High-level stats and a flair for the flavor of the game — that's the way designer Brian Haferkamp addresses big-league sports in his baseball, basketball and football games.  

Join us at the Pro Football Hall of Fame, Canton, Ohio, for the second APBA Football Club football-exclusive tournament. Rebooting our first event, held in the legendary APBA summer of 2013, we want to raise the bar on that inaugural event.  

Russell R. Wren is the latest representative of a significant group that is the future of tabletop sports gaming: retirees who return to the games that fueled their youth.  

Tim Plum and Peter Donis met on a school bus in seventh grade in 1978 and have been friends and collaborators ever since. Peter introduced Tim to Dungeons and Dragons, and a lifelong friendship and game design partnership was born. Tim, a member of a Statis Pro football league for 28 years, eventually introduced his idea for a football game to Peter. (Tim also played hundreds of Statis Pro baseball games, including ’83 and ’87 Dodger replays).   

Ron Pisarz Jr., like so many of us, fell in love with the classic Sports Illustrated football game Paydirt. It wasn’t until about two decades later that, while honing his chops as a software engineer, he revisited that “gateway game” as an exercise in converting it to digital form — and Data-Driven Football was born.   

Video version: https://youtu.be/Ipt3rs2m9Z0

Meet your Chicagoland APBA tournament director Rob Spatz. Taking over the reins of the pack-leading competition from Doug Schuyler not long after it was created during that legendary APBA Summer of 2013, Rob has refined the tournament rules and location as he plays host to folks from 11 states. That's a far from from the original five participants of the inaugural Chicagoland event on July 27, 2013 — and Rob has room to grow the tournament.

Video version: https://youtu.be/w-CMzOoSCag

Phillip Schwarzmsnn is a Euro-game expert whose time in Finland working for Nokia gave him a deeply immersive experience in the mechanics of those games. But he’s also a former Strat and Statis player who keeps one foot firmly in the world of sports sims (he began playing Out of the Park version 3 in the early 2000s). He’s aiming to bridge the gap between classic sports sims and contemporary games — whose themes run the gamut from the Alhambra to Taverns of Tiefenthal to Wingspan. His concept, Sandlot Stars, immerses players in a colorful, card-driven baseball-themed game for three rounds — the seventh, eighth and ninth innings — with elements of ballpark effects and Yahtzee-style dice probabilities in the mix.   

Jack Dolan didn't become a baseball fan until his mid-30s, but his APBA life began in the early '80s during his time stationed in Germany. On Sept. 10,  he will host the first Shoeless Joe APBA Baseball Tournament at Fluor Field in Greenville, S.C.

Bryan Aldrich, creator of 4th Street Software, shares his thoughts on navigating the ins and outs of creating realistic but playable games. His board and computer creations include iterations of football, baseball, basketball and hockey — and he's put some thought into creating a racing game.   

Widely experienced tabletop sports savant Mark Miller, aka Jerry Cuan, shares his varied tastes and takes on a slew of cards-and-dice football, baseball, golf and bowling games. Known for his significant work expanding the experience of Al Wilson’s Fast Drive Football, Mark also has a history of helping Pete Ventura enhance Replay Baseball.